RMST373

RMST373

Don Quixote and Errant Subjects in a Global Context

Plate I of Gustave Doré's illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. From Chapter I.

Discover Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote (1605), through close readings covering topics that range from gender, race, translation, economic crises, to religious turmoil and social inequality. By applying an interdisciplinary approach, Cervantes’s works will be discussed in relation to the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain, drawing upon the visual arts, films, music, dance, opera, historical texts and education manuals, while deconstructing the different kinds of fiction — pastoral, picaresque, sentimental Moorish novella, Italian novella, and romances of chivalry — that inhabit this novel.

Special emphasis will be placed on examining the representation of “others,” within the context of the expulsion of Jewish and Moorish minorities. The course will consider “errant” subjects in its two dimensions: as those straying from the accepted course, unacceptable actions; and traveling in search of adventure, a wandering journey.

Attesting to his global reach, Cervantes has been influential to thinkers from Lukács to Foucault to Bakhtin to Girard to the Frankfurt School, and to writers from Nabokov to Borges to Flaubert to García Márquez and beyond. His works have served as inspiration for painters (Goya, Doré, Dalí, Picasso), musicians (Purcell, Telemann, Massenet, Strauss, Falla), cineastes (Pabst, Welles, Gutiérrez Aragón), and critics (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Marthe Robert). As regards Don Quixote, no other book, with the exception of the Bible, has been translated to more languages, or undergone more editions and reprints. A herald of modernity, Miguel de Cervantes’s works casts a vast influence on Hispanic and World literature as a whole

Required texts:

  • [Optional] Spanish Version: Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Tom Lathrop. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005. Legacy Edition. (ISBN- 978-158977-100-0)
  • González Echevarría, Roberto, ed. Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Elliott, John Huxtable. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. New York: Penguin, 2002.
  • Lathrop, Tom. Don Quijote Dictionary. Cervantes & Co, Juan de la Cuesta, 2005.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Language of instruction: English

ITAL380

Italian Food Cultures

Cross-listed with RMST350

Italy is world-renowned for its food cultures and Italians put great care into food preparation, consumption, and appreciation. It’s no wonder that Italian food-related themes permeate the country’s cultural life and beyond. This course examines cultural representations of Italian or Italian-derived foods and the role that they play in articulating larger social issues in contemporary Italy, including regionalism, anti-globalization, family history, gender and sexual identities, Italian American food, tourism in Italy, and immigration to Italy. Through studying primary texts such as films and literature, students are encouraged to form a complex picture of Italy’s relationships with food cultures in a global context. Oral presentations, as well as a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing), are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Participation in seminar-style, group discussions in class is essential to developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Italian. But it requires a passion for Italian food and culture!

The course is particularly recommended to students at 2nd year standing or higher.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Expand all
|
Collapse all
Grading Breakdown

Final project: 35%
Prospectus: 15%
Four "Culinary Stories" (improvised oral presentations) and written reports: 40%
Class participation, regular attendance, and professionalism: 10%

Readings

Coming soon

SPAN501

[Cross-listed with FREN 512B]

Cultural Mobilities in Theory and Practice

Cultural mobility can be defined as mobilities relayed in and of cultural products, events, and phenomena. The concept can be viewed as part of a recent, influential critical movement to foreground mobility in social sciences and in the humanities and arts. According to Tim Cresswell (On the Move, 2006: 2-3), mobility is the effect of movement, meaning, and power. John Urry underscores the necessity to analyze assemblages or interconnections of five interdependent mobilities in social life: the corporeal travel of people; the physical movement of objects; imaginative travel through perusing the media; virtual travel through, for instance, Zoom meetings; and communicative travel using, for example, social media (Mobilities, 2006: 47-8). The mobilities paradigm has been used to explain significant socio-cultural phenomena, ranging from social inequality to global climate change, all of which are related to physical movements in crucial ways.

This course introduces the research field of cultural mobilities in relation to case studies focused on several mobile subjects—namely, merchants, explorers, tourists, colonizers, political pilgrims, migrants, and refugees—within Italian, French, and Chinese contexts. The course is divided into two units. In the first unit, students learn critical frames and tools from social scientific and humanistic inquiries into mobilities. In the second unit, students are encouraged to use these theoretical insights to approach major intercultural events (e.g., the Age of Discovery, the Grand Tour, and migrations) as they are articulated in narratives of diverse types (e.g., novels, journalism, diaries, and films). In particular, we consider authorial intent, knowledge creation, cultural technologies, affects, meaning-meaning, and power dynamics that these narratives help articulate. Through this exercise, toward the end of the semester, we assess how we may contribute to further theorizing cultural mobility analysis

Language of instruction : English

ITAL378

Colonial and Postcolonial Italy

Benito Mussolini's bust carved into a rock in Adwa, Ethiopia.

Often considered the “least of the Great Powers” by its European colonial counterparts, Italy had nurtured expansionist ambitions since its Unification in 1861. At its peak, during fascism, the Italian Empire annexed parts of Libya, Greece, Albania, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, in addition to a concession in Tianjin, China. But soon after the WWII, the Italian public forgot about this history.

It was not until the 1990s when historians began to explore Italy’s colonial past. But so far Italians have not fully incorporated the country’s imperial history and its legacy into public discourse. Why did this amnesia occur? And what implications did it have for today’s multiethnic Italian society, particularly when the country has been experiencing a so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis and a surge of migrant entrepreneurship in its vibrant sector of small- and medium-sized enterprises? In addressing these societal phenomena in relation to primary texts (literature, films, media coverage, visual materials), students will discuss mobility, gender, and race in relation to several specific case studies.

Oral presentations and class debates, as well as a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing), are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Participation in seminar-style, group discussions in class is essential to developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities.

Prerequisite: Second-year standing or higher.

Language of instruction: English

FREN556D

Identity, Ideology and Power

Instructor: Marie-Eve Bouchard
Language of instruction: French

This graduate seminar will delve into three critical themes in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology: ideology, identity, and power. Its broad objective is to examine how language ideologies are involved in the construction of power structure and social identities. Focusing largely on key articles, this course engages with debates and methods for analysing linguistic evidence pertaining to symbolic power, cultural contact and language shift, migration and mobility, authenticity and identity, resistance, and digital communication. Throughout this seminar, we will explore the social, economic and political consequences of different identification strategies by discussing how people’s beliefs about language reinforce or contest normative power structures and social. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French. The class is designed for three main audiences: 1) graduate students in French linguistics, 2) graduate students in the French literature interested in language use, and 3) advanced undergraduate students who have taken sociolinguistics courses at FHIS. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French.

Recommended readings: Most readings will be available on Canvas.

ITAL322

Italian for Reading Knowledge

ITAL322 is a course for beginner and lower-intermediate students of Italian, or students with proficiency in any Romance language, including Latin. It is addressed to students who also want to develop their language skills and build their competences in order to understand the intersection of language, meaning-making and culture. It is perfect to develop reading skills of primary sources in Italian.

The course develops and builds on reading knowledge. It focuses on the essential elements of grammar, syntax and word formation, drawing on similarities and differences between other Romance languages.

The course is built around a series of reading activities which will progressively expose the student to different types of written texts and communicative intentions, and introduces Italian grammar and vocabulary naturally, as part of each text.

Required readings:

  • C.M. Piatti, M. Mattei, Letture in Gioco, Alma Edizioni, 2015
  • S. Nocchi, New Italian Grammar in Practice, Alma Edizioni, 2017

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisite: Proficiency in another Romance language or Latin, or successful completion of ITAL 102.

(Pro)creación. Escritura y maternidad en la España contemporánea

2022 | Olga Albarran Caselles

Publisher: Ediciones Libertarias

Full description:

If all literature is born from a conflict, the works that arise from maternal ambivalence have all the necessary ingredients to be considered universal literature, despite the fact that they have not yet found their place in the canon. (Pro)creación explores the literature of gestation and, from literary criticism, investigates how different authors from contemporary Spain have captured their relationship with procreation in artistic language. In dialogue with theories on the writing of the self, feminist criticism and recent studies on reproduction, this volume starts from the present to examine the procreative process in the autobiographical novel, the epistolary diary and the personal chronicle, taking as reference three representative works: Who wants to be a mother, by Silvia Nanclares (2017); Waiting Time , by Carme Riera (1998); and nine moons, by Gabriela Wiener (2004).

In these pages it is shown that textualizing, from the point of view of the pregnant subject, a traditionally silenced event makes it possible to reclaim the social and political aspects of reproduction, as well as maternal agency in a process that is both creative and reproductive. By linking reproduction and writing, the analyzed authors open up new expressive possibilities that challenge the androcentric conception of the subject, vindicating the affective aspects of the relationality that is established during the search for conception and gestation.

In this way, the expression of affection —bodily emotion— problematizes the binary of Western thought, making visible the insoluble union of the mind and the body that creates and procreates. Despite the fact that procreation has been confined to literary silence, this does not imply a vacuum: it is, on the contrary, an elastic and dynamic silence that has been filled with critical questions to give rise to a debate that cannot be postponed. This book tries to keep that conversation active so that it does not remain, as has traditionally happened with matters related to the maternal world, in a mere whisper.

Bilingual Legacies: Father Figures in Self-Writing from Barcelona

2022 | Anna Casas Aguilar

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Full description:

Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janés, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions.

Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal “father of the nation” and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.

Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe

2019 | By Katharina Piechoki

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Full description:

What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.

Combinatoires ludiques : littérature, contrainte et mathématique

2020 | By Caroline Lebrec

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Full description:

Au sein des études ludiques, les théoriciens insistent davantage sur l’aspect social du jeu (Caillois, Huizinga), faisant un peu vite de la littérature ludique un acte gratuit ou encore une simple forme de divertissement (Genette). Le jeu dont il est question ici est de l’ordre du construit et de la configuration, dans la lignée de l’approche philosophique de Jacques Henriot et dans la plus grande tradition mathématique. Notre corpus est constitué de deux textes combinatoires fondateurs de l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, Cent mille milliards de poèmes de Raymond Queneau et Le château des destins croisés d’Italo Calvino. Leur nature combinatoire, dont l’absence de linéarité demande au lecteur de faire des choix et des hypothèses, est un défi au labyrinthe, qui est ici analysé selon le potentiel reconfigurateur du sonnet sur les modes de l’interaction physique du lecteur avec le texte et du texte avec l’objet-livre pour le texte quenien, et selon le potentiel interprétatif du lecteur sur les modes de l’embranchement et de la réécriture pour le texte calvinien. Le champ des littératures à contraintes est constitué majoritairement de modèles de lecture cryptanalytique qui privilégient les textes avec une modalité implicite (Wagner) de métatextualisation de la contrainte. Au contraire, cette étude s’intéresse à la modalité ergodique empruntée à la cybernétique (Aarseth), qui met en place une rhétorique de la contrainte (Reggiani, Thomas) servant un projet plus vaste de lisibilité du texte combinatoire.